Lisa Wingate’s new book The Prayer Box (Tyndale House) follows the story of a troubled
young mother, Tandi, and her relationship with an elderly woman, Iola. While
caring for Iola, Tandi discovers 81 prayer boxes that span Iola’s life. What’s
inside those boxes will transform her forever—teaching her something about
grace and redemption.
WHERE DID
YOU GET THE IDEA FOR THIS NOVEL--TWO CHARACTERS IN DRASTICALLY DIFFERENT STAGES
OF THEIR LIVES, CONNECTING ON A VERY DEEP LEVEL?
The Prayer Box is a book that came to be
completely by accident… if you believe in accidents. I prefer to think
that it was divine intervention. It was an idea that literally gob-smacked
me out of the blue one day as I was sketching out some short book ideas at
a publisher’s request. I looked across the room and saw a prayer box that had
been given to me at a speaking event, and thought, What if the prayers of
a person's entire lifetime were recorded in prayer boxes? What would you learn
if you opened those boxes, and how might it change you?
The concept
came almost fully formed. I knew it would be a story about a young woman whose
life is in ruins, and that she’d end up being given the job of cleaning out an
old house that’s also crumbling. I knew that inside the house she’d find
eighty-one carefully decorated prayer boxes that are basically the chronicle of
the life of the woman who owned the home. They would literally contain the
story of a lifetime.
I had
originally set the book on the Texas coast. I imagined that the lessons in the
prayer boxes would slowly awaken the main character from the dead sleep of a
failed life, redeem parts of her that had been lost. I knew that the
story would be set in a small seaside community that was struggling to recover
from a hurricane, and that the main character would be an outsider who comes
there seeking refuge. I knew that there would be connections between the life
of the woman who created the prayer boxes and filled them with letters, and the
life of the woman who finds the boxes.
What I
didn’t know was that a longtime reader-friend of mine, Ed Stevens (whose
personal history inspired my earlier novel, Dandelion Summer), would
suggest that the Outer Banks of North Carolina needed some attention after
hurricane Irene, and that I should set a book there. At first I just filed the
information away with my “someday” ideas, but Ed was determined. Not too long
after that, he offered my research crew and me a stay in his daughter’s beach
house in Duck, NC, which was all the convincing I needed. Setting The Prayer Box in the Outer Banks added
a wonderful new dimension to the book. The Outer Banks became a character in
itself. It’s an area rife with history and legend and the setting enriched the
story in ways I could never have anticipated.
TANDI HAS
A TROUBLED PAST. CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT HER?
Tandi is a young woman
with a difficult and dangerous history. Like so many women who've grown
up in chaotic and frightening family situations, she has unwittingly repeated
many of the family patterns with which she was raised. She has created a toxic
environment for herself, thirteen-year-old Zoey, and nine-year-old J.T. Tandi's
lack of self worth and the absence of support systems have led her to make poor
relationship decisions -- to validate herself based on who she's dating. She
has no concept of herself as valuable to the world or to God. She loves her
children, but has no idea how to raise them. Hatteras Island, where she
spent time with her grandparents as a child, is one of the few places she has
felt safe in her life, so it is the place she runs to when she flees an abusive
marriage to a controlling older man and an addiction to prescription
painkillers. The rental cottage behind Iola Anne Poole's decaying Victorian
house is a hiding place, but it quickly becomes a refuge and a place of
incredible growth.
WHAT IS
THE RECURRING THEME THROUGHOUT THIS NOVEL?
The recurring
theme in The Prayer Box is grace,
what it is, how it changes lives, how we discover it, accept it, and pour it
out to one another. In terms of the story, the work of grace is shown
through the contrasting ways Iola and Tandi have chosen to react to the
circumstances in their lives. Both women come from difficult pasts.
Both have suffered at the hands of cruel and unscrupulous people.
Both have been rejected and hurt and wounded. Both are outcasts.
Iola has
chosen not to accept the painful labels people have assigned to her, but
instead to accept only God's label for her, Beloved. Tandi, on the
other hand, has no concept of herself as a child of God or a person of
intrinsic worth. She has allowed the people around her to sculpt every
part of her, to determine her identity, to cause her to lack faith. What she
has to learn in the story is that she is beloved and that she can
claim that, internalize it and build a good life, a life that matters. She has
to learn that she can't keep going through life letting people walk off with
pieces of her that belong to her and to God.
WHAT DO
YOU THINK READERS WILL ENJOY THE MOST ABOUT THIS BOOK?
I think
readers will enjoy watching Tandi grow into a woman of purpose, become whole,
cast aside the destructive family patterns, and finally provide a good life for
her children. But more than that, I think readers will enjoy meeting Iola Anne
Poole and spending time in the place she loved, Hatteras Island. It's an
amazing area. There's so much history on those islands -- lighthouses, and
shipwrecks, and pirate legends, and incredible natural beauty. Of the Outer
Banks, Iola says in her letters to God, "You have brought me one step
short of heaven." Sitting at the edge of earth and sea on Hatteras, it's
easy to feel that way. Iola's appreciation for the islands and her
determination to save them was one of the things I loved about her. She's a
remarkable individual, a woman limited by the times in which she lived, yet
courageous in doing what she could for the people around her and the islands. She's
a quiet servant, not the sort to seek attention or require accolades. Her
work is hers and God's, as are her struggles and her triumphs... until Tandi
discovers them.
PRAYER
BOXES ARE NOT SOMETHING YOU HEAR ABOUT OR SEE EVERY DAY. CAN YOU TELL US
EXACTLY WHAT A PRAYER BOX IS?
Prayer boxes
have a long tradition in Jewish history and among early Christians, but other
than occasional use or use as a novelty gift, they aren’t used that much in
modern Christianity. Honestly, that’s a loss. A prayer
box is like a prayer journal, but it’s more flexible and low-pressure. Any
scrap of paper you run across any time of the day will do, and you can drop it
in your prayer box whenever you have the chance. Closing the lid is symbolic of
giving it over to God and letting it go.
Prayer boxing
and the idea of taking the time to record our prayers, hopes, and gratitudes in
writing (as Iola did in the book) is so very valuable. Wouldn’t it
be wonderful, when a child graduates, to be able to give that child the box of
hopes and prayers written by parents and grandparents during the first year of
life? Or for a couple on their 25th anniversary to re-open the
box from their first year of marriage? For years, I’ve given
journals or prayer boxes to couples as wedding gifts and encouraged them to
write down their hopes and gratitudes during their first year of life, then
keep them. It’s a great exercise while they’re doing it and a
precious keepsake for later. It’s also their story, preserved.
I hope that
readers, among other things, will see prayer boxes in a new way after reading
the book. The 81 boxes discovered in Iola’s house are the
story of her unsung life. There is, in the end, nothing more true to who
we are than what we pray for.
YOU ALSO
WROTE AN ESHORT PRELUDE TO THIS BOOK--WHERE DOES THE PRELUDE PICK UP THE STORY?
The Sea Glass Sisters is a stand-alone story of mothers,
daughters, sisters, and the perfect storm. It's also an introduction to
Hatteras Island and the (fictional) community of Fairhope, where The Prayer Box is set. At
Sandy's Seashell Shop, a little place that makes a big difference in the life
of Tandi in The Prayer Box,
hurricane preparations are underway, but back home in Michigan, Sandy's family
is determined to convince her to retire, sell her little seaside store, and
move back home to the family fold. No one moves Seashell Sandy anywhere she
doesn't want to go. Sandy is just the sort of force-of-nature person who's
typically found at the center of a strong tribe of women, andthe Sisterhood of the
Seashell Shop is determined to weather this storm on Hatteras, just as they've
weathered all the storms before.